title: On the neighborhoods of trees.
abstract: Tree rearrangement operations typically induce a metric on the space of phylogenetic trees. One important property of these metrics is the size of the neighborhood, that is, the number of trees exactly one operation from a given tree. We present an exact expression for the size of the TBR (tree bisection and reconnection) neighborhood, thus answering a question first posed by Allen and Steel . In addition, we also obtain a characterization of the extremal trees whose TBR neighborhoods are maximized and minimized.
authors.affiliation: North Carolina Central University, Durham.
authors.forename: Peter J
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: Humphries
authors.forename: Taoyang
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Wu
mesh_terms: D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D008957:Models, Genetic; D010802:Phylogeny